that is implying a contradiction as Winamp doesn't have a native ASIO plug-in. if you are using a 3rd party plug-in (as your post is implying despite the other part) then you need to seek an update for that plug-in and / or contact the plug-in author directly.

well, i thought saying no additional plugins EXCEPT asio would make it clear..

i already had the latest version of ASIO4ALL in this case. noticed it was beta, installed last stable over it, no changes. so i still think it's unlikely to be the plugin's fault regarding also the fact that it works perfectly well in adobe audition.

you really cannot compare Winamp and a 3rd party plug-in to Adobe Audition. and from what i'm aware off about ASIO4ALL, that implies your audio driver doesn't have true ASIO support anyway which might be leading to the 3rd party output plug-in having issues with interfacing with things - definitely something you'd have to follow up on with the plug-in's author.

ASIO drivers usually provide their own control panel where the sample rate can be selected. Have you tried the songs with just the official WA plug-ins? If you provide them (on mindshare.com or something similar) I will test on my system. I don't use ASIO4ALL and if they play or don't play right on my system, it may provide further clues where the problem lies.

as you can see in the picture, no sample rate can be selected from the controls. i tried with that 44.1<->48khzbox ticked and without. what makes me wonder is that in the windows device control of my ESI interface, i can't change the default samplerate and bit depth settings, which are set to 16bit, 44100Hz. maybe that is where the problem comes from. which would make me wonder even more why it works in audition then.

i can't use the direct sound plugin in winamp, i get the magical "error creating direct sound buffer" error. i don't know if it worked on a fresh winamp install without the asio plugin, i installed the latest winamp over 5.622 and it inherited the asio plugin.

You misunderstand, I offered to try to play the songs on my system which does not have the ASIO plug-in. I need the 44.1 KHz and 48 KHz versions of the song. I do not need the output plug-ins you are using.

I also do not have (or want) Adobe Audition. Maybe the licensed mp3 decoder it uses is configured to automatically downsample 48 KHz to 44.1 KHz on your system. Check your settings and documentation. Which version of Audition are you using?